Halloween Games

Having built in free time to teach students to explore the web and other software, I found a bunch of online games in keeping with this time of year.

• Halloween with Boowa and Kwala
• National Geographic Kids Monster Fill-In
• National Geographic Halloween Fill-In
• Kaboose
• Ben & Jerry's
• Primary Games
• Black Dog
• Squigly's Games
• Disneyland Halloween Time
• The Kidz Page
• Billy Bear's Playground
• Hershey's Online Coloring Book
• Free Halloween

Sites for Halloween graphics

Next week we will use graphics and create decorations for our Halloween Open House and to take home. Here are some sites with great graphics.

• Holiday Graphics.com: has interactive games also
  
• 1NetCentral
• Free Web Images & Clip Art
• Halloween Glitter graphics
  
• Halloween text generator

Something interesting to note: there are so many options linked to social networking! Now that web design is so easy it has finally become ubiquitous!

Halloween themed lessons

This week we will review how to navigate a web browser, specifically utilizing built-in search capabilities. Unfortunately the most common search engines are blocked so we will go directly to askkids.com, which provides a great opportunity to review where the address box is in a web browser to type a web address you know. We will also use askkids.com to search for images, a function also blocked in the major search engines by our district. There are great Halloween graphics to copy and paste into a word processor. From there we can review what was learned in our first week: how to change text attributes to make it more interesting. Next week we will definitely be able to create Halloween posters to take home.

Internet search going well

The lessons seem to be going well. Last week we learned about search by using the browsers' built-in search bars, and searched using keywords. Then we completed Eduplace's guide on using the web for Grades 3-5 and Grades 6-8.

This week we reviewed how to identify what browser we use at school, other browsers, and search engines geared toward young students (Yahoo! Kids, Google for Kids, KidsClick!). We also learned about online ads, what they look like, and how to make sure we click on the actual search results and content on a web page, especially important when reviewing search results so that students are not fed misinformation, and even more important when searching for free time games so students can click on an actual game instead of wasting time on an advertisement :)

The only hiccup came when I had a class type in the website address instead of clicking a link: lesson destroyed. Even though I had covered where a website address is located, the young students had not carried that knowledge over and I had made it too easy to just click through lessons. I did ask them how they get to websites if they don't know the addresses: the response in unison: we just search for it! LOL! I guess I taught the lesson on search a little too well! So now I have to make sure they understand how to get to a website when it's provided and they'll be on the way to being true digital citizens.